Document Which Terrorized Bachelors and Spinsters Credited to Mayor -Best Ad. for Town Since Cardiff Giant.
Fort Dodge, Ia. - Not since the days of the Cardiff giant has Fort Dodge had such signal distinction heaped upon it as has been conferred through the introduction of the marriage ordinance in the city council recently. Not long ago people who did not know that there was such a place as Fort Dodge, Ia., are to-day talking about it. From almost every state in the union letters have poured in, either condemning the ordinance or upholding its originator in his purposes. The past few days the mayor's mail has been burdened with an unusually large number of letters from girls, who have asked him to put them in correspondence with some of the more eligible bachelors of the city, whom the mayor declares are growing entirely too numerous.
As is commonly the case with the unheard of, some small incident can be traced to the beginning as the prime mover that suggested the idea, and the marriage ordinance in this case is in no wise an exception. It all came from a small matter originating with the police force. On the force are two bachelors, Peter McCabe and John Qualey, who have had to endure the expense of all "layoff" on account of the other members being married, and the mayor favored them. Both of these men protested at the discrimination, and at last the mayor suggested that the only way in which they could be placed on an even footing with the other members of the department was for them to get married. They again protested that it was not reasonable that they should be singled out for compulsory marriage and no one else, whereupon the mayor declared that he would make the thing general.
No one who looks at Mayor Bennett's picture would pick him out as a joker, but there is not a man in all Iowa who enjoys a joke more than he. It was not intended that the ordinance should have any further attention, and while the local papers used it as a feature of the council proceedings, there was nothing more thought of it until outside papers copied it and letters of inquiry began to arrive. From that on the joke grew to such proportions that marked copies of papers and letters from all over the United States were addressed to the mayor. Probably no one person has enjoyed this huge fiasco more than he, and many are the hearty laughs he has had over letters addressed to him.
For years there has been a deadly strife between Fort Dodge and Waterloo for supremacy. Just recently Waterloo has enjoyed the distinction of a street car strike which has won for it a larger portion of metropolitan distinction. Fort Dodge could not stand idly by and permit her hated rival to acquire these newly achieved honors and make no effort to outdistance her. The outside papers asked for more news regarding the marriage ordinance, and here was the opportunity for which the reputation builders of the city were looking. Miss Jenny Cameron, principal of the Castlewood private schools for children, was created a leader of the spinsters in opposition to the ordinance. Jennie was made to hold mass meetings, boycott a mythical department store with a mythical manager, and Charles Swift, another fictitious personage, was made to take up the opposition in behalf of the bachelors. And thus the story of the ordinance and its effect, resulting in the agitation and scenes, was fostered and added to until every daily paper from coast to coast has given space to more or less of the reports sent out.
--Suburbanite Economist, Chicago, May 10, 1907, page 3.
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